Videos for cutscenes and menus

From Mod Wiki

What You Will Need

Whether you intend your video to be used as part of the main menu backgrounds, or as a cutscene executed during the game's storyline, you'll first need to create your movie file. There are numerous different programs available for creating/editing video. Probably the most easily available is Windows Movie Maker and Windows Live Movie Maker. These come packaged with Windows XP and Vista. For Windows 7, you'll have to either download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 or Windows Live Movie Maker. These programs are easy to use and allow for quickly piecing together videos from source material, sounds and/or pictures.

Other appliactions are available for further applying filters and compression techniques. VirtualDub is an excellent tool that can be used to reverse video footage, resize without major loss of quality, extract/swap audio files, etc.

No matter what application you decide to use for creating and editing your video, you'll need ffmpeg2theora-0.16 (ffmpeg2theora0.16) to convert your video to a format that X-Ray will accept.

NOTE - although newer versions are available, for some reason their output is NOT recognized by X-Ray, and video will not play. v0.16 seems to be the most recent version that will work correctly with STALKER.

Creating .ogm For Playback

X-Ray will only recognize .ogm video files with no audio. One can't do a simple conversion with a 3rd-party program, though, and hope for the best - the video needs to be properly re-rendered for X-Ray to accept it.

Once your video is complete, it's best to save it in .avi format. Remember to remove any audio tracks in your video . . . this is where VirtualDub can come in handy, as you can use it to extract the audio from your finised video in .wav format. The audio tracks will have to be properly converted through the STALKER MP SDK (see Editing Music and Sounds for explanation). Now you'll need to use ffmpeg2theora to convert your video file to X-Ray's format. fmpeg2theora can convert numerous different video input formats, but playback in STALKER can be questionable (loss of color, quality, etc.) - .avi is your best bet.

ffmpeg2theora will need to be run via command line. Copy your video file to the same directory as ffmpeg2theora, and open a Command Prompt box (DOS-box) and navigate to your chosen directory (it may be easier, if you're unfamiliar with navigating the Windows command-line interface, I'd recommend placing both your video and application in your root C:\ directory). Once there, you'll need to run the converter like so:

C:\ffmpeg2theora-0.16 yourmovie.avi

This will simply convert the "yourmovie.avi" to "yourmovie.ogg." There are numerous different option flags available for more complex conversions. You can have the application resize your video, change bitrate and output quality, remove audio, and even change output format (amoung other things). To see the list of options available and how to use them, simply type:

C:\ffmpeg2theora-0.16

Once your done with your video conversion, simply rename the video's extension from .ogg to .ogm. Copy the video to your STALKER gamedata directory, and you're all set!